Clémence Michallon

How did you become a writer? I was seven years old when it occurred to me that if books exist, it means people must be writing them. I was a kid who learned to read early, but before that, I had never thought to wonder how books came to be at all. I was content just reading them. 

The lightbulb moment came one school day, when my teacher put a poster on the blackboard—it was an illustration from a children’s book, and it featured a squirrel in a tree, and a bird flying close to the squirrel. We were told to imagine what the two animals might be saying to each other. Maybe the bird was lost and needed directions?

Completing that exercise was the most fun I’d ever had. And that was the day I came home and announced, “I want to be a writer.” I kept at it, writing little stories, and then detoured my way through some pretty bad poetry in middle and high school, and started a lot of things I never finished in college.

Becoming a journalist taught me discipline. It taught me to sit down and write. In a newsroom, the writing has to happen now. There is no time to wait for inspiration. And running marathons taught me that if I work on a bigger goal a little bit every day, those small efforts will add up to something larger. That’s how I ended up being able to write novels.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). Megan Abbott, for starters. The Fever was the first novel of hers I read, and it was life-changing. I was struck by her prose, and by the way she writes about girlhood and womanhood. I set out to read her other books and couldn’t get enough of her work. There is something so vivid and sensory about her writing, including her latest novel, Beware the Woman, which had me in its thrall from the first pages. All of which is to say, Megan Abbott changed my life as a reader and as a writer.

Mary Higgins Clark was also an influence: I spent an afternoon reading my mother’s copy of Loves Music, Loves to Dance, one summer when I was a kid. I started flipping through it, skipped to the big reveal, thinking I’d jump to the most interesting part, then learned a vital lesson: you cannot enjoy the payoff of a crime novel if you don’t go through the buildup first. The ending of that book is absolutely terrifying.

And, you know, I’m always reading, and I have intense memories of books I read while I was working on The Quiet Tenant. Those included Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer;  Alexis Schaitkin’s Saint X; Zinzi Clemmons’ What We Lose; Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall; Paul Tremblay’s Survivor Song; Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind; Alafair Burke’s The Better Sister; Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa; Daisy Johnson’s Sisters; Hilary Leichter’s Temporary; Lucie Britsch’s Sad Janet; and Lily King’s Writers & Lovers.

Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women is why I ended up writing the main character’s perspective in The Quiet Tenant in the second person, and Rachel Monroe’s Savage Appetites informed much of my thoughts about the ways we think and talk about crime.

When and where do you write? Whenever I have time, and wherever I can. I’m on book leave right now, so I get to write at my desk during the day. When I’m working at my day job (I’m a journalist), I’ll work on my fiction in the morning and/or in the evening. Sometimes, if I feel the need for a change of venue, I’ll move from my desk to the little red cafe table in the kitchen. That’s enough to feel like I’m moving from one job to the other. But really, I’ll write anywhere. I have written on my phone in the subway. When I’m working on a first draft, all that matters is getting the words down. It’s liberating to let go of the ideal writing setup – and I offer this as a suggestion to other writers.

What are you working on now? What am I not working on? The night before The Quiet Tenant came out, I sent my agent the draft of a new psychological thriller. The following day, I broke the laptop on which I wrote that novel (which was also the laptop on which I wrote The Quiet Tenant), so you could say I’m working on not breaking any more computers! But really, I’m working on this manuscript, getting it into shape. That’s my favorite part: when I have a complete draft and can play with various aspects of it, and hopefully make the whole thing a little better.

I’m still working on a few things for The Quiet Tenant, too. I have a bit more travel planned, and as I type this, I’ve recently returned from Brookline, where I did an event with Paul Tremblay, and Houston, where I did an event with Ashley Winstead. It’s been a fun summer promoting the book and meeting generous writers and readers. I’m working on getting my life back to normal after all this excitement. As of this morning, I have groceries in my fridge, for the first time in a week!

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? I don’t think I have. That doesn’t mean I think I’m immune to it, though. Nor does it mean I haven’t struggled, been stumped, or had moments of uncertainty. So far, my experience has been: “Get an idea, white-knuckle my way through the first draft, start having more fun during revisions, endure occasional moments of intense paranoia that nothing is working, and carry on.”

I have a friend who told me countless times, when I was working on The Quiet Tenant, to just finish the first draft. A friend like that might be the best remedy to guard against writer’s block.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? I had a creative writing professor in France who was also a novelist. One day, while talking about character development, he said, "By the end, you have to know everything about a character. What are they like? What do they eat? How do they f**k?” So very French, no?

I found it a bit cliché. I mean, it seemed like something an eccentric writing instructor would say in a movie. But years later, I discovered he was right! Once you’ve written a novel, you know if a particular aspect of a character’s life doesn’t come through on the page. You just do. So, as long as I don’t know something about a character…I keep digging.

What’s your advice to new writers? Read. When you think you’ve read enough, read more. I don’t care which format you read in—paper, e-book, audiobooks, First Folio, whatever gets you to read. You cannot write if you don’t read. Read in your genre, and read outside of it, too. You never know what’s going to end up instructing your writing.

And, of course: Finish. The. First. Draft. It doesn’t matter if it’s not good. You’ll fix it in due course!

Clémence Michallon was born and raised near Paris. She studied journalism at City University of London, received a master’s in Journalism from Columbia University, and has written for The Independent since 2018. Her essays and features have covered true crime, celebrity culture, and literature. She moved to New York City in 2014 and recently became a US citizen. She now divides her time between New York City and Rhinebeck, NY.

Paz Pardo

How did you become a writer? I started out in theater, first as an actor and a director—but the stories that I was getting to work on always felt just a little off from the ones I wanted to tell (or drastically off; after getting cast as three rape victims in three months I could see myself building a career consisting of looking scared onstage that would come to a screeching halt as soon as I stopped passing for sixteen). Writing was a way of taking control over what kind of art I was dedicating my life to; instead of auditioning for whatever was available or trying to sell myself as the best option for directing A Christmas Carol, I was creating the stories I needed to tell from scratch. 

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). I grew up on sci-fi—if you're into that and read my novel The Shamshine Blind, you can hopefully see my love for William Gibson and C.J. Cherryh on the page. Through their prose I found my way to the classic hard-boilers, Dashell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. N.K. Jemisin's ability to world-build not just through description but also the metaphors she uses in narration and puts into the character's mouths is a huge influence. 

The latest thing I'm working on isn't speculative, and draws more from influences like Lily King and Jenny Offill. I'm also excited to play with mixing genre and literary work in a different way than I did with The Shamshine Blind; in my first novel, the beats of the noir genre structure the book. In my next one, I'm planning out a mise-en-abyme where a mystery story plays out inside a realist plot. I'm thinking of the way that Margaret Atwood threads a science fiction serial throughout The Blind Assassin, or the way that Kevin Wilson's narrator works out her anti-Nancy-Drew novel in Now Is Not the Time to Panic.

I credit Elizabeth McCracken's long-standing crusade against "sentient, anguished helium balloons" with vastly deepening my work. Bret Anthony Johnston told me in grad school that I should stop writing like I was getting away with something. That's stuck with me. 

When and where do you write? In an ideal world, I write every morning at a desk in the office space I share with my husband at home. I discovered that mornings are my best writing time when I was in my early twenties, and that has stayed constant. Being in the office keeps me from deciding to do the dishes and helps me feel focused. 

In the real world, with a toddler in the house, I write wherever and whenever I can, whether that's the dining room table, the kitchen counter, or on my phone at the playground. My brain still fires best before 1 pm, but the dream of daily uninterrupted writing hours is on hold for the time being. 

What are you working on now? A new novel. During the pandemic, a mystery writer moves with her family to a small town in the Argentine Andes that conspiracy theorists claim was the secret hiding place of Hitler after he faked his suicide. When she starts writing a mystery loosely based on these outlandish claims, she discovers the town's actual history as a Nazi hiding place. As she grapples with the implications of the fact that her life choices have led her to raise her son in a place that stocked the boards of its most prestigious schools with war criminals, her life begins to unravel.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Yep! Right now, in fact, I've got a nasty case of it. I've tried to learn to think of it as part of the process—usually the block means I need to rethink something, or that something else in my life is taking up the back-burner brain space where I'd be unconsciously writing otherwise. But it's still frustrating as hell whenever it hits, whether it lasts a day or six months. 

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? I'm a firm believer in Isabel Allende's "Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up too." That, combined with "Write every day for at least two minutes" (a version of which Bret Anthony Johnson blessed me with in grad school) has kept me sane—and kept me writing, writer’s block be damned.

What’s your advice to new writers? Find your people! It's so important to have people you trust, whose work you love, who will buck you up in the bad times and cheer for you in the good—but who will also offer honest feedback in a way that helps you revise what you've written. It's the only way I've gotten where I am. 

Paz Pardo is the author of The Shamshine Blind, which Kim Stanley Robinson called “a deadpan hilarious allegory for our times” and the San Francisco Chronicle described as “appealingly strange.” Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, LitHub, The Brooklyn Review, and Howlround Theater Commons. Her plays have been performed across the US, Argentina, and Colombia. She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers, her BA from Stanford University, and is the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship. She lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. More at https://www.pazsays.com/.

John Milas

How did you become a writer? My childhood involved a lot of bedtime stories and library books and I was exposed to Bible narratives on a daily basis. The inundation of narrative was a foundational thing for me as I grew up, so I assume this is why I feel so compelled to tell stories now. But I'm sure a psychologist could figure it out for us.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). I am a loyal follower of Sol LeWitt's "Sentences on Conceptual Art" from a 1960s magazine called 0 To 9. I was introduced to the piece in a poetry workshop in grad school and now find myself deeply moved each time I encounter it, particularly the fifth sentence, which reads, "Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically." I draw influence from any artistic medium, including from works that I do not understand or that I do not personally enjoy. Anything can push you in the right direction. Aside from the books that helped me as I wrote The Militia House, I studied the feature film The Blair Witch Project, the documentary Combat Obscura, and a mid-series episode of The X-Files.

What are you working on now? I have been working on a collection of Kafkaesque stories about the Marines and I have a couple of novels that are based on some other unrelated life experiences that I'm getting started on, both of which are fantastical and/or speculative in nature.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Honestly, I don't think so. I either choose to write or I choose not to write. I'm not sure I agree with the notion that a force of nature could stop someone from writing because then there's an implication that a force of nature enables someone to write. I think the truth is that writers need to enjoy writing, and if that's the case there will never be such a thing as writer's block; you'll just be writing to write, not because of some external standard you're holding yourself to. Also, it's okay to not want to write. It's not healthy to feel guilty about that.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? When I was in grad school, the poet Mary Leader told me and my friends that the work itself, not publication or external validation, should be the writer's reward. I've considered that very seriously for years. A writer should be most excited to do the work. Following this advice will change your writing, for the better, more than anything else.

What’s your advice to new writers? Daydream as often as you can, even if you have to steal the time from yourself.

John Milas is a writer from Illinois. His short fiction has appeared in The Southampton Review, The Journal, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. His debut novel, The Militia House, is out now from Henry Holt.